Higher Lessons in English

The plan of "Higher Lessons" will perhaps be better understood if we first speak of two classes of text-books with which this work is brought into competition.

 

In one class are those that aim chiefly to present a course of technical grammar in the order of Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody. These books give large space to grammatical Etymology, and demand much memorizing of definitions, rules, declensions, and conjugations, and much formal word parsing,-work of which a considerable portion is merely the invention of grammarians, and has little value in determining the pupil's use of language or in developing his reasoning faculties. This is a revival of the long?endured, unfruitful, old-time method.

 

In another class are those that present a miscellaneous collection of lessons in Composition, Spelling, Pronunciation, Sentence-analysis, Technical Grammar, and General Information, without unity or continuity. The pupil who completes these books will have gained something by practice and will have picked up some scraps of knowledge; but his information will be vague and disconnected, and he will have missed that mental training which it is the aim of a good text-book to afford. A text-book is of value just so far as it presents a clear, logical development of its subject. It must present its science or its art as a natural growth, otherwise there is no apology for its being.

 

In this revised work we have given additional reasons for the opinions we hold, and have advanced to some new positions; have explained more fully what some teachers have thought obscure; have qualified what we think was put too positively in former editions; have given the history of constructions where this would deepen interest or aid in composition; have quoted the verdicts of usage on many locutions condemned by purists; have tried to work into the pupil's style the felicities of expression found in the lesson sentences; have taught the pupil earlier in the work, and more thoroughly, the structure and the function of paragraphs; and have led him on from the composition of single sentences of all kinds to the composition of these great groups of sentences.

 

But the distinctive features of "Higher Lessons" that have made the work so useful and so popular stand as they have stood-the Study of Words from their Offices in the Sentence, Analysis for the sake of subsequent Synthesis, Easy Gradation, the Subdivisions and Modifications of the Parts of Speech after the treatment of these in the Sentence, etc., etc. We confess to some surprise that so little of what was thought good in matter and method years ago has been seriously affected by criticism since.

 

The additions made to "Higher Lessons"-additions that bring the work up to the latest requirements-are generally in foot-notes to pages, and sometimes are incorporated into the body of the Lessons, which in number and numbering remain as they were. The books of former editions and those of this revised edition can, therefore, be used in the same class without any inconvenience.